As in the case of hashish, the discovery of cocaine was set in motion by the self-experiments of a curious physician posted to a foreign destination. Paolo Mantegazza was a young Italian doctor who spent four years practising in Argentina in the mid-1850s, during which he encountered coca-chewing Indians and tried the leaves himself. Having found coca leaves agreeable as an evening tonic, he proceeded to chew as much as possible to test their effects to the limit. His book On the Hygenic and Medical Values of Coca, published in 1859, described the plant’s power to increase muscular action, remove hunger and fatigue and, at high doses, to produce a thrilling mental excitement and stimulate rapid-fire speech. Intrigued by Mantegazza’s account, the University of Gottingen requested a sample, and in i860 the young chemist Alfred Niemann was presented with 25 kilos of coca leaf shipped from Lima, from which he produced a white crystalline alkaloid that he christened ‘cocaine’.
Niemann died within a year, and his work was largely ignored. As one of many recently isolated alkaloids, and with the potency of the coca plant still unproven because so many samples arrived from South America spoiled, cocaine languished on the laboratory shelf for twenty years. In the interim, however, coca wines and tonics became popular pick-me-ups, and in 1883 a German army doctor, Theodor Aschenbrandt, acquired a sample of the pure alkaloid and tried adding it to the water he supplied his Bavarian recruits. He observed an increase in stamina, and recorded his hopes that soldiers might use the drug to dispense with food and sleep for extended periods, even as long as a week. The following year his paper came to the attention of another self-experimenting doctor, a young Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud, who followed its references back to the work of Mantegazza and ordered his own sample of the drug from the Merck pharmaceutical company in Darmstadt, who listed it in their exhaustive catalogue of research chemicals.
During his research into cocaine, the young Sigmund Freud, studying under Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, was sometimes obliged to attend formal dinners that made him shy and nervous. In letters to his fiancee, Martha, he confessed to dosing himself with small amounts of cocaine to supply confidence and ‘untie my tongue’. (Wellcome Library, London)
Freud, swallowing doses of a tenth of a gram dissolved in water, immediately noted ‘a sudden exhilaration and a feeling of ease’, and suspected that he had made a significant discovery. The nineteenth-century pharmacopeia was becoming relatively rich in sedatives - new synthetics such as chloral hydrate were by now widely used alongside morphine and opium - but there were no stimulants more effective than the old standbys of tobacco, alcohol, tea or coffee. Alert to the danger that self-experiment might slide into self-deception, Freud proceeded to establish that his feelings of increased energy were not all in his mind by measuring his muscular force with a dynamometer, and showing objectively that cocaine increased it. He published his findings in 1884 in a paper entitled ‘Uber Coca’, his clinical reportage spiced with exuberant language intended to convey the sensations the drug imparted. Cocaine was a ‘gift’ from nature that produced ‘the most gorgeous excitement’, not merely a stimulant but a mood elevator that reliably produced
‘exhilaration and lasting euphoria’.
As Freud’s career progressed and the public image of cocaine took a darker turn, ‘Uber Coca’ would become a hostage to fortune, used by his opponents to blacken his reputation for the remainder of his life and beyond. With hindsight, its glaring omission is its failure to mention the addictive properties of the drug, and the dangers of repeated high doses. Many blamed Freud’s reckless self-experimentation for his rosy view of cocaine; but perhaps his experiments were too cautious. After a small dose, he confessed, he felt nothing but ‘a slight revulsion’ at the idea of taking more, but larger doses would have revealed the less benign effects of the drug. At the time, however, Freud’s most obvious tactical blunder was his failure to capitalize on cocaine’s most promising medical application, as a local anaesthetic in eye surgery. The credit went to his Viennese colleague Carl Koller, who had noticed its numbing qualities when Freud first presented him with a dose.
Traditional coca farming in the Andes, in an engraving from 1867. Traces of coca have been found in 3,ooo-year-old mummies, and the leaf has been widely cultivated and chewed across the region for at least 1,500 years. (Wellcome Library, London)
World History
